Sermons & Meditations

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; Colossians 3:12-17
Presented June 14, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday after Pentecost/Music Sunday

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott tells the touching story of a young man named Ken who began attending the small Presbyterian congregation where she worships in the San Francisco area. Ken was dying of AIDS, disintegrating week-by-week before the eyes of the congregation. Anne writes of Ranola, a devout African-American woman in the congregation, who from her seat in the choir loft looked askance at Ken, raised as she had been with the conviction that Ken’s way of life was an abomination. But Ken continued to come and worship with the small congregation week after week, and in a year’s time had won much of the congregation over. One Sunday, after having been so weak that he was unable to attend for several Sundays, Ken was back. Though looking more emaciated than ever from the disease, Ken nevertheless spoke joyously during the sharing time of his life and faith, and of the wonder of God’s grace and redemption. And then, as the congregation sang the old hymn, God’s Eye is on the Sparrow, reaching the chorus, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?” Anne noted that Ranola, who had been looking skeptically at Ken, suddenly altered her perspective. Ranola’s face melted, and she hurried to Ken’s side, lifting him up, holding him in her arms as together they sang with tears falling down their cheeks.

Observes Anne Lamott about that experience:

I can’t imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy. Maybe it’s because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, your breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.

Meeting in places we couldn’t get to any other way. Have you not experienced this power of music to touch hearts, to overcome differences, to heal hurts, to lift spirits? Periodically someone will say to me, somewhat apologetically, “I appreciate your sermons, but often it is the music in our worship service that most speaks to me.” There’s no need to apologize, for music may well be the means by which you encounter afresh the healing gift of God’s gracious love.

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2 Corinthians 8:1-9
Presented May 24, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Seventh Sunday after Easter

Scott Peck begins his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace with a version of an old story entitled “The Rabbi’s Gift,” a story I’ve encountered in a number of different forms. The gist of the story focuses on a once-famous monastery that had fallen on difficult times. At one time, its many buildings were filled with young monks, the church building resounding with rich chanting of the Psalms. But now the monastery was dying. Only five monks remained: the abbot and four others, all over seventy years of age.

In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in the hermitage. And so they would whisper to one another, “The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again.” At just such a time, while the abbot was agonizing over the imminent death of the order, it occurred to him that he might visit and ask the rabbi if he had any advice that could save the monastery.

The rabbi warmly welcomed the abbot to his hut, but when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. “I know how it is,” he lamented. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore.” And so the seasoned rabbi and abbot wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. When the time came for the abbot to leave, the two embraced. Said the abbot, “It has been a wonderful thing that we should meet after all these years, but I have still failed in my purpose for coming. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you might offer that would help me save my dying order?” Sadly, the rabbi responded, “No, I am sorry. I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is among you; the Messiah is one of you.”

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Acts 8:26-40
Presented May 10, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Fifth Sunday of Easter

The longer I serve in ministry, the more convinced I become that the call to live as communities of God’s people requires a fundamentally new way of thinking; it demands the embracing of thought patterns many would see as countercultural. The prophet Isaiah, you may recall, once proclaimed for God to the ancient Israelites,

My thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Indeed, our surprising and sometimes baffling God again and again calls us to grapple with new perspectives, to venture forth onto unforeseen paths, to embrace the risky pathway of discipleship. It is a matter, the Gospel writers tell us, of denying self, taking up the cross, and following in the footsteps of Jesus—the One who little concerns himself with status and position in life, but who instead models a life of servanthood, peacemaking, generosity, and gratitude. Along the way, as we take seriously this call to another way of living, we may well find the tidy plans we have for our lives disturbed and turned upside down!

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1 John 3:16-24
Presented May 3, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Our church’s Outreach and Growth Ministry Group recently took a look at the number of “hits” on our website in recent months, and discovered that the section of the website most visited—more than double any other section—was Community. It’s not surprising, really, that this would happen, for we live in a society literally starved for genuine community, parched by a lack of authentic interaction among neighbors. Quaker author Philip Gulley’s book entitled Porch Talk is based on the author’s observation that we have quit building homes with front porches. The author laments the loss of the significant conversations that occurred on many of those porches, not only within families, but also the valuable contact with neighbors who were passing by. Writes Philip Gulley,

This is the irony—we have more talk than ever before [these days], but too little communication; so many words, but so little meaning. “Bombardment” is the word that comes to mind—talk radio, 24-hour news, hundreds of television channels, and, God help us, gas pumps that spout the news along with fuel—coarse exchanges fraying the ties that bind….

I do not wish to romanticize the porch. Not all of the talk reached the level of Plato or Jefferson, but there was a luster to those talks, a certain glow and depth lacking in these days of e-mail and instant messaging. Perhaps it was the parenthesis of silence, the bracketing of conversation with reflection.

When my wife and I bought our home, we gave careful consideration to the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Little did we realize the most valuable real estate would be the two hundred square feet of our porch. On it, we have solved all of the world’s problems, evening after pleasant evening, arcing back and forth in our wicker swing, the twilight breeze bearing all our cares away.

Truth be told, it is easy to romanticize the past. And yet, who among us does not recognize the truth in Philip Gulley’s observations? Surely this critical element of meaningful communication has been all but lost in many areas of contemporary life, as we have created a climate in larger society that encourages going it alone in life. All too many live lives cut off from others, even their own family members. In a recent issue of Newsweek, in “The Last Word” column, Anna Quindlen laments the fact that parenting in our culture has become largely a solitary activity. Writes Quindlen, “It used to take a village to raise a child, but there isn’t a village anymore. Instead of extended family, there’s a playground where everyone pretends everything’s fine.”

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John 20:19-31; 1 John 1:1-4
Presented April 19, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday of Easter/Earth Day Sunday

Flora Slosson Wuellner, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, begins her book Prayer, Stress, and Our Inner Wounds with the observation, “As a young girl, when I first read the life of Jesus in the Gospels, I thought: If God is really like that, we are in safe hands!” Intriguing, isn’t it, that some can read the very same Gospels as did Wuellner, and see portrayed in them, not a God in whose hands we are safe, but rather an angry God, a threatening and vengeful God ever waiting to trip us up, a God who evokes a sense of fear deep within us. Perhaps because there is so much mystery in life, so much we cannot easily explain, some embrace a threatening God whom they can hold responsible for all of life’s struggles and woes. But my experience leads me to read the Gospels as does Flora Wuellner, finding there the story of a God who stands with us in our times of uncertainty and grief, a compassionate and grace-filled God who loves us with a tenacious love, a God who has formed us as God’s beloved daughters and sons.

There are times, of course, when life seems to fall in upon us, times when we simply do not know which way to turn, and it is precisely at those times when it is both difficult—yet ultimately satisfying—to trust in the goodness of our God. At such times we are invited and challenged to enter into the deepest struggles of life without being defeated by those struggles. Flora Wuellner puts it this way:

God does not send us pain. God is not a wounder or a punisher. This is important to understand as our trust in God grows. But neither does God let our wounds be wasted. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, will not remove the lines of hard-won experience from our faces. A new power of light, the light of the divine passionate compassion, will shine through those lines on our faces.

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